Your Life Is A River

While sitting in hospital this morning, post surgery from yesterday I was reading Your Year For Change, by Bronnie Ware. Its a great book of her insight to living, as she was working with people who were dying, and learnt so much from them and how she uses those lessons in her own life now and helping others to live life now, not have regrets while you lay on your death bed.

In chapter 16 Flowing Forward, she talks about the start of the creek that breaks into different directions that lead into the river, that also goes in different direction to lead to the ocean. This is one of the best metaphors for life and life's choices. For each diversion the creek takes to get to the river, is the choices we make in our lives, for every bump and turn is a new choice of direction.

I made a choice two years ago to compete in the Busselton Half Ironman, knowing I had a possible injury. that injury didn't show up as bad through my training, until the run leg of the triathlon. Since doing that triathlon I have learnt that I had a calf muscle tear, and sesamoiditis, Now I should have stopped running prior to this, but the stubbornness that resided in my was so strong, I didn't want to give up my love of running. I got to the point of seeing my sports physician nearly three months after the triathlon, and was told that I wasn't to run anymore, so we could give the foot time to rest and try to heal. Jumping to today (nearly two years since the triathlon) I had surgery yesterday to fix the issues. I had a ligament removed and also one of the sesamoid  bones as well that was aggravating the ligament as well. The surgeon was able to pull tendon through to stabilize the other bones. So we got the best outcome for the future.

As for running in the future it won't happen. I made the decision a long time ago that I wouldn't be able to go back to pounding the paving, as only being 44 years old I still have a lot of time to be on my feet, and don't want to make it worse before its needed. We are constantly going down the creek, to the river of choices in our lives. Now I am a firm believer that the universe puts turns and bends in our creeks and rivers for us to make the choices to make it to the ocean (our purpose). In the past couple of weeks since I did the Rottnest Channel Swim I have many ask about swim coaching, or people asking me questions on what is the best for open water training. Is it the right avenue to go down or not, I will take my time in thinking and watching for the direction down the river. It has been something that has played on my mind for a little while and I have enjoyed coaching my training partner/boss over the last twelve months leading up to the Rottnest Swim. It will be interesting to see what the universe puts in my path to show me the right way.

As we all swim or kayak down the creek, river to the ocean we have the decisions to make on our journey, there is no right of wrong (unless you are putting yourself or others in harms way) decision as we will make it in one way or another. Life isn't supposed to be a straight line or we wouldn't learn anything on the way.

Have a great week everyone

Hayley xx